Meet the Dancing Otter That Helped Obama Win the Presidency

It would happen a couple of times each month at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. Ben Hagen would giggle and then send out a web link to his coworkers, the geeks who ran the technology operation for the Obama reelection campaign.

Soon, the sound of Kenny Loggins’ inspirational 1979 hit “This Is It” would fill the office, and the dancing Otter would pop up on machine after machine. It was Hagen’s way of telling the team he’d found another bug in their web code.

The geeks who built Obama’s internet infrastructure sat side-by-side, in a long row in the campaign’s Chicago headquarters, and sometimes, you could hear Kenny Loggins echo down the line. “The laughing would kind of work its way down the row and you’d see people’s screens light up with dancing otters and the sound progressing down the row,” Hagen says. “It was a pretty gratifying experience.”

It was gratifying because Hagen — a security engineer with the campaign — was helping to lock down Obama’s websites, securing them from a common web programming error called a cross-site scripting bug. The otter was the campaign’s version of the RickRoll — an annoying internet joke — but it also carried a message. In essence, Hagen was publicly shaming people into writing better code.

It’s an unusual method, but it seems to work — and it’s indicative of the campaign’s overall approach to technology. Traditionally, political campaigns are far from the cutting edge of tech, but Obama 2012 was different. The team operated very much like a Silicon Valley startup. They grew quickly, building an enormous code base using many of the popular open-source tools that underpin companies such as Google and Facebook and Twitter, and they built it atop Amazon’s cloud platform, unafraid to put their code on third-party servers.

Hagen chose the Kenny Loggins music because “This is it” was a popular sound sample in the team’s Campfire chat software, and he chose the dancing otter because, well, he just liked it. We laugh every time we see it. But make no mistake: it aimed to solve a serious problem for the campaign. Hagen was plugging security holes that could allow hackers to post anything they wanted on one of the campaign’s websites, which were used by tens of millions of Obama supporters.

Whenever he’d find a cross-site scripting flaw on a website being tested on the campaign’s staging network, he’d exploit the flaw and insert the otter. It was slightly humiliating to the web programmers, but they enjoyed it too. “You can only describe the otter dance as erotic,” said Scott VanDenPlas, the tech team’s development and operations lead, speaking last week at the same conference.

The move to AWS was equally unusual. VanDenPlas called it a first for a presidential campaign. “All of us came from a traditional ops world,” he said. “It was a little bit of a gamble in that we didn’t have the full experience at the time. We just kind of trusted that we would hire very smart people that would figure it out.”